The Chances

The Chances is a Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher. It was one of Fletcher's great popular successes, "frequently performed and reprinted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."

The play's Prologue assigns the play to Fletcher alone; since his distinctive pattern of stylistic and textual features is continuous through the play, scholars and critics regard Fletcher's sole authorship as clear and unambiguous.

For the plot of his play, Fletcher depended upon Miguel de Cervantes, one of his regular sources; The Chances borrows from "La Señora Cornelia," one of the Novelas ejemplares, first published in Spain in 1613 and translated into French in 1615. (Fletcher exploited another of the Novelas for his Love's Pilgrimage.) The play must have originated between this period (scholars dispute Fletcher's knowledge of Spanish) and the dramatist's death in 1625. Current scholarship assigns the play to 1617 (it refers to Jonson's The Devil is an Ass, performed the previous year), as a work staged by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre.

During the years of the English Civil War and the Interregnum when the London theatres were officially closed to full-length plays (1642–60), material from The Chances was extracted to form a droll titled The Landlady, which was later printed by Francis Kirkman in his collection The Wits (1672).

The play was revived early in the Restoration era; Samuel Pepys saw it in 1660, 1661, and 1667. Like many Fletcherian works, the play was adapted during the Restoration; one popular adaptation by George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham was first staged in 1682, and was a hit for its star, Charles Hart. David Garrick staged another popular adaptation in 1773. In 1821, Frederic Reynolds staged a musical version of The Chances under the title Don Juan, or The Two Violettas.

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